Search engine marketing, planned as one search strategy

AED 9,000 to AED 35,000 covers most of what we are asked to build. The number moves on how many query clusters and markets are in scope, whether both paid and organic execution are included or only the mapping, and how many languages. Media spend is separate. Anything quoted before those are known is a guess. We scope first, then price, and the scope document is yours whether or not you proceed. These are market ranges rather than a fixed rate card — the proposal carries the real figure.

SEO is earning a listing. SEM is the wider discipline of getting visibility on a search results page, and in most current usage it means the paid side plus the strategy that decides between the two. The useful way to think about it: SEO is one of the tools SEM chooses from.

Historically yes — SEM was coined to cover everything you do to appear in search, paid and organic together. Over time the industry narrowed SEM to mean paid search, and now both usages are in circulation. We use the original one, because planning them separately is the mistake this page exists to fix.

Neither, and the question is usually the wrong one. Paid buys you a position today and stops the moment you stop paying. Organic takes months and then keeps working. For a term you can realistically rank for, organic wins on economics over a year. For a term dominated by competitors with far more authority, paid may be the only route in. The answer is per query, not per channel.

The common split is on-page, off-page, technical and local. On-page is the content and structure of the page itself. Off-page is mostly links and mentions elsewhere. Technical is crawling, indexing and speed. Local covers Google Business Profile and map results, which for a Dubai service business is often the highest-return of the four.

Sometimes. If a competitor is bidding on it, usually yes, because their ad sits above your organic listing. If nobody is and you rank first, you are often paying for a click you would have had free. It is worth testing by pausing brand campaigns for two weeks and measuring total brand traffic rather than assuming either way.

Yes. The map is a standalone piece of work with a fixed price and it is written to be handed to whoever executes, including your existing agencies. Several clients use it exactly that way.

It works, and it is common. We run the paid side and the mapping, share the map with your SEO agency, and everybody works from one document. The thing that must not happen is two teams optimising for the same query without knowing it.

The paid half moves in weeks. The organic half takes three to six months for meaningful movement on competitive Dubai terms, longer on the hardest ones. The mapping itself often changes where money goes in the first month, which is the fastest win available.

Blended cost per acquisition first — total search spend divided by customers acquired through search — then the split by channel underneath it. Plus movement on the priority query clusters from the map, so you can see terms changing hands.

Yes. Volume in the UAE is much smaller than Google, but cost per click is often materially lower and the audience skews towards desktop and B2B. It is worth running as an import once Google search is stable.